What is the difference between visitors on the Rocket Dashboard and pageviews on Google Analytics?

Customers new to Rocket.net Managed WordPress sometimes ask “Why does the Rocket Dashboard show more visitors than Google Analytics does?”

The answer lies in how Google Analytics counts visitors versus how Rocket.net tracks visitors. In fact, you might say that Google Analytics and Rocket.net don't track the same things exactly.

How Google Analytics tracks visitors

Google Analytics tracks visitors that have JavaScript enabled. This generally means that the visitor being tracked is a human who is using a standard web browser, be it on a mobile device, laptop, or desktop PC. Google is focused on helping you understand all of the statistics surrounding the people that visit your website. But, these aren't the only visitors to your website, and that’s where Rocket.net is different.

How Rocket.net tracks all visitors

Tracking visitors who have JavaScript enabled in their browser is a great way to track humans visiting your site, but the truth of the matter is that it does not paint a clear picture of all visitors to your website. There are non-human visitors to your website: bots, crawlers, and other automations that visit your site on a regular basis.

These bots and crawlers do not have JavaScript enabled, so Google Analytics does not count them because they are not human visitors. Google Analytics is a marketing tool that is only interested in gathering statistics about humans that can be turned into conversions.

Although these automated visitors are not the same as human visitors, they still consume similar amounts of resources that a human would. Chief among these resource is bandwidth. For this reason, Rocket.net tracks all visitors to your site, regardless of their nature. Any HTTP GET request made to your site is tracked. At times, bots can represent a very large percentage of traffic, which correlates directly to what you see on the Rocket Dashboard.

Conclusion

To boil it down to its simplest form, Google Analytics tracks humans for marketing purposes, while Rocket.net tracks all visitors (even automated bots and crawlers) because they all impact your website and hosting. As a result, you see higher numbers on your Rocket Dashboard than on Google Analytics.